Blue Mercy: A Novel.

by Ross, Orna

  She listened, one ear angled towards me, forehead bobbing in encouragement, eyes on my face the entire time. I cried familiar hot tears of shame and she took my hand and we talked it all through, her experience and mine, knowing from what we had learned on our course that all over America, women in pairs and groups were having similar whispered conversations. Feminists, as we labelled ourselves. Pulling back the rug of what we called patriarchy. Revealing the silent slime beneath.

  As for Star and me, we were back with Dr Aintree, who said she could no longer talk to me. If she was to carry on with Star, it had to be as her client, and what happened in session would now have to be confidential.

  It would be up to Star if she wanted to tell me any of it. Surprise, surprise, she didn't.

  It would be up to Star if she wanted to keep going. Surprise, surprise, she gave up.

  The gap between us was becoming a gorge. At the beginning, each outbreak of aggression or blame, each rebuff or denial, each stupid mistake, had felt like an isolated incident. We'd have a period of peace when I would think we were getting some connection again, but then realize that it was only something she wanted, something practical or financial, that was drawing her back to me. Once I'd given or refused it, along would come the next eruption, casting us up into temper then down into the cold chasm, each dip a little lower, a little colder than than before.

  Until you find you're permanently down there. So far down, you've given up even imagining how you might ever crawl back out.

  Poetry helped. I watched television, but that was good only for passing the time. I read novels, sometimes poor ones that passed time a little better, but also stories that were more than that. The Brontës for passion. George Eliot for intellectual fervor. Jane Austen for wit. Toni Morrison for compassion. Henry James and Alice Walker for their, each very different, outsider's eye. But stories took time to digest. When I needed a quick hit of consolation, I turned to poems. The people whose words supported me through all that was to come were Walt Whitman, John Keats, John Donne, Sylvia Plath, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Percy Shelley. I lay out their names, a list you'll find in any canon, nothing original or pioneering about it but just as I freely tell all here, in the private whisper of mind to mind that is a book, so I want to acknowledge in writing how those writers helped me. How they were, simultaneously, the door on my house and the gap in my fence.

  "Have you ever considered," Marsha asks, "that there might be more?"

  Marsha is the other mature student on our course and we are, as we often do, enjoying a coffee between classes.

  "More?"

  "Locked away? Repressed? I had only the vaguest memories of what my uncle did to me until I went into therapy."

  She invited me to go on what she called a rebirthing weekend, a two-day session that used breathing techniques to bring about the recall of lost memories and through that, transformation. "You'll remember something you've forgotten, guaranteed. It might be your birth, or it could be some other grief or trauma from way back when."

  "Forget it, Marsha. I'm Irish. A feed of booze and a two-day hangover: that's our idea of therapy."

  "You don't even drink," she said.

  "You know what I mean. I'd rather let sleeping dogs lie."

  "Even if they're silently yowling inside?"

  "Is that what you think?"

  "You tell me," she said, and looked at me too hard over the rim of her coffee cup.

  Over the weeks that followed, I found myself thinking about the word she used: "Rebirth." The idea appealed but the procedure Marsha described made me nervous. She offered to come with me, to be the partner that every participant had to have during the session, to look out for them.

  "Like a second, in a duel," I said.

  "Not a bad metaphor. It is like a duel, the better part of you will be slaying a weaker part."

  "With breathing!" I laughed.

  According to Marsha, she had been a mess before this rebirthing. Chronic pain in her lower back. Disappointed with Danny, her eldest boy, and generally with the hand life had dealt her. Negativity eating her up. This description of herself bore no resemblance to the woman I knew and admired. Negative was the last word you'd use for Marsha, whose slightly protruding teeth were always rushing towards a smile. Not just her teeth, actually. When Marsha smiled, every part of her was gathered into that beam of long white teeth, brilliant as a photographer's flash.

  She was the most engaged person I knew, in her work as a classroom assistant; in her voluntary activities for the hospice that eased her mother's death; in her exercise routine – swimming and yoga, both daily; in the projects she was forever taking on for the needy: fundraising or second-hand clothes collecting or event-organizing. All this, not to mention the degree she was cruising through, and yet, somehow, she always seemed to have enough time. When she was with you, Marsha was totally with you, giving you full, unhurried attention. When she was alone, she was apparently complete.

  Not fretting over "the kids", her tall, successful, non-troubled twenty-somethings.

  Not restless for other places or experiences.

  Not mourning lost love.

  Marsha loved life. She was a thinker and a giver. I went to the rebirthing weekend, but not for the reason I told her: that she'd give me no peace if I didn't. I knew if I genuinely asked her to back off, she would.

  I went because I wanted something of what she had managed to find for herself.

  The procedure was to sign in on Friday morning at The Rebirth Center and stay until Sunday evening, accommodation and meals included. Our facilitator was a woman called Frankie in a pink tracksuit and we were sixteen women and two men in loose, comfortable clothing, each with a partner, all of us believing we had been mistreated -- the word to use was "abused" -- as children.

  Marsha sat on the beanbag as I took off my shoes and lay down beside her on the mattress. Frankie ordered us to close our eyes and a soft male voice came across the sound system telling us to relax, to breathe softly. Some new-age music started up, celtic-style pipes.

  "Breathe as though your breath is liquid," the voice said, smooth as olive oil itself. "Let your breath make a noise in your throat as you breathe in and out."

  I did as he said. Now that I was here, I would do whatever I was told to do. The lights were slowly dimmed, then extinguished. Full darkness, deepening by fathoms as I continued to breathe in this very deliberate way. Sensations of numbness and tingling rose in my limbs and face. The music changed. A drum sound entered and the beat picked up.

  "Now breathe fast," ordered the voice. "Breathe as though your life depends on getting as many breaths inside you as fast as you can."

  The drum sound became louder. Lights flashed on and off and the heavy drums rose another few decibels and now wild music was pouring in on top of the relentless beat. Distress came welling up in me, brimming over, drowning my heart. I heard a prolonged shriek. The slide of a violin bow? A screech from one of the others?

  Now all sorts of cries and moans were thickening in the room, adding another layer to the strange music. I knew Marsha was there beside me, that I could ask for her hand, or for a drink of water, or to help me get up and leave -- Frankie had said we could do that any time -- but I'd moved into a different world, with new and urgent rules that made hand-holding or water or escape irrelevant. I had to keep breathing hard and fast, breathing like a madwoman, had to... wanted to... I felt the distress inside shape itself into a loud scream. This time, definitely me.

  Time warped, folded over. At one point I broke to ask for a tissue with which I dried my eyes and into which I blew my nose, then matter-of-factly I returned to the breathing, in and out, in and out and the breath in time a memory was pushed up, out of my center. I had come expecting my father, but what I got was my mother. Specifically, her funeral. Her body in its coffin in our front room. The room hot, so hot, and me, my face boiling red from being closed in for too long. A fly was crawling up her face from her lip towards o
ne of her eyes, the one that was not quite closed, that had a small opening at the inner corner.

  I couldn't take my own eyes away -- if I did, the fly was going to crawl all the way in there, his skinny leg was going to touch the innards of her eye. The thought made me panic, but around me, everyone saying how well she looked, laid out in her Sunday-best suit and high heels.

  "She's dead, for God's sake," I wanted to shout at them. "What are you talking about?" But I couldn't have said that then - I was only two when she died. As soon as I think this thought, I'm at another funeral, nearly a decade later. Still hot, too hot, running around the room with some other kids. I've taken off my new and scratchy jacket. As I pass my father on the way to the food table, he catches hold of my arm.

  "She's as flighty as a feather, this one," he says to his brother, Uncle Benny, sitting beside him.

  "I can see that," the uncle replies. "What's your name?" he asks me.

  "Mercy."

  He laughs, says, "It was a blue mercy, all right, when you married the mother."

  Daddy pulls me down onto his knee.

  "What's this?" he says, lifting my arm. He points to the down forming in my armpit, starts to laugh. Uncle Benny laughs too, loud and false: ho ho ho. I spring from my father's grasp and run off, with their laughter chasing after me.

  Now I'm screaming: "I cannot do this, I cannot do this, I cannot do this." The ache in my chest hardened and swelled, a boulder that might burst. I was clutching my rib cage. Marsha, growing worried, called Frankie over to check, but I was fine, apparently. I was aware of these events, but they were behind gauze, everyone else in a different pleat of time.

  Next day, after the deepest of sleeps, we sat in a circle in a sun-lit room and wrote down the memories that the process had "resurrected" and then shared them with each other. Nobody -- including me -- got to the end of their story without crying. I hated it, crying in a roomful of strangers, but I had given myself over to what was happening. It was bigger than me; I didn't understand any of it.

  Did I really remember my mother's funeral when I was only three? Why did I feel I was responsible for her death? Why was I mixing up that day and the other funeral? I hadn't known what Uncle Benny meant by a blue mercy, and I'd looked it up later in my small school dictionary and, when I didn't find it there, in the big blue book at the library, The Oxford English Dictionary.

  Frankie wasn't giving us time for introspection. Once everybody had spoken, she gave each of us a tennis racket. It was not our experiences that had damaged us, she explained, but our repression of the appropriate response to those experiences. What we needed to do was feel our anger because, when that is suppressed, toxic amounts of endogenous neuro-chemicals accumulate in the brain. She was going to teach us how to give ourselves an "anger detox".

  Holding the most painful part of the memory in our heads, we were to take our tennis rackets and beat our anger out onto the beanbags.

  Any questions?

  "What if we don't feel any anger to the person in our rebirthing?" I asked.

  "Honey, you are angry with her, believe me."

  "Am I?" I was surprised by the "her". "I don't think so."

  "Anybody here think Mercy isn't angry with her mother?"

  Everybody shook their heads or murmured no.

  "What happened yesterday didn't come from nowhere, hon. It came from a part of you that knows more than surface you. So why don't you ditch the tears and give in to a good old tantrum?"

  We were each assigned a beanbag. Frankie and her assistants came up behind us and encouraged us to beat harder and faster if we seemed too slack. Then we were sent home with a list of suggested activities to do whenever we felt anger rising.

  I have that list still. Select one of the following, it says. Pound on a bed with your fists and yell. (Use a tennis racket to spare your fists if you prefer).

  Take a pair of jeans, hold it by the ankles, and whack the hell out of your bed.

  Tear up a phone book. Yell while you tear. (Put on work gloves to avoid paper cuts.)

  Yell, scream or shriek into a pillow in the closet.

  Pound on the wall, or hit a punching bag. (Put on heavy gloves.)

  Throw things at the wall. (Not random things: safe objects, like pillows.)

  Take pages out of a magazine, tear them in half, and throw them around the room.

  Do a dance of anger.

  Stomp your feet when you walk.

  Kick a rock down the street.

  NOTE: The use of knives or dangerous weapons is to be avoided.

  One spring morning, Star made a pronouncement over breakfast, her official breakfast -- the cereal and fruit she shared with me -- before moving to a day of resisting, then succumbing to, doughnuts or pastries or muffins or rolls or pancakes or blinis before moving on to potato chips or corn chips or fries or sweets or chocolates.

  "You know, Mom," she declared, after a week of being particularly obnoxious, "We need each other. We're the only family we've got."

  "Is this Ginnie's latest theory?" I asked.

  Ginnie, Venom, had recently declared she wanted to be a psychiatrist so she could perform lobotomies or give ECT. She and Star made an ever more odd couple, Star in her outsize black booted outfits and piercings, Ginnie half a foot higher, turned in towards her, talking. Always talking, talking. Ginnie had become supremely good at pretending to be on Star's side while actually undermining her. A benevolent controller, Marsha called her.

  "I thought you'd approve," Star said. "You would if it was anyone else who said it."

  Maybe I would if Ginnie's adopted name wasn't turning out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. She'd developed a cynical streak, with increasingly poisonous opinions on everything, most especially on my shortcomings. "It makes sense," Star said, shovelling a heaped spoonful of cereal into her voracious mouth. "With no aunts, or uncles or grandparents, no other family, is it any wonder that we're too much for each other?"

  She spoke on but I wasn't listening. I was stuck on those two words: each other. What had I done to you, Star, that weighed, even in the smallest way, against your insults and aggressions and rejections? Made your food? Washed your laundry? Paid for your education and the extra-curriculars that you decided to skip, often as not? Tried to protect you from a father who was never going to do anything but hurt you?

  Each other: that stuck in me, irksome and impossible to leave alone, like a sliver of food between the teeth that the tongue can't shift. I thought I'd welcome her saying such a thing. Instead, I found myself wanting to to get up and go over to the sink to rinse my bowl. I wanted to deal her back a slight, an insult, an act of disrespect, just one in return for the countless numbers I'd swallowed.

  I thought of doing one of her favorite tricks, covering my ears and singing la-la-la so I couldn't hear what she was saying. I thought of -- somehow I know this would be the worst -- ignoring her, changing the subject, pretending I didn't understand that this was her big effort.

  You'd want to be a saint, an outright saint, to resist.

  When we're like this, her fat always feels like an onslaught. The back of her head now banked from ears to neck with flesh, settling in rings. Her breasts now an indiscriminate pillow of flesh, captured but not contained by her bra, overlaying duvets of flesh above and beneath. Each of her thighs was now the size of my waist. Each one seemed to scream. You thought an end point had been reached? Hah, were you ever wrong. This will go on and on! This will get worse and worse!

  All I could see was her fat, her walking her fat walk around the kitchen, feet splayed, taking too much effort. Toting her fat bag over her shoulder, perspiration already breaking on her forehead before she'd even walked out the door. Most fat people wear fat clothes -- loose, baggy, indiscriminate -- but not Star. Tight layers that ignored her bulges were her style. From the knees down, she was encased in lace-up boots, the spiky, metal-studded kind. And I understood the intention: is there anything more poignant than fat-woman feet in high heels, bulgi
ng through their straps?

  Horrible, isn't it? I didn't want to be thinking like this, holding such twisted thoughts about my own daughter. Neither did I want the tension that had become a living component of my body, a perpetual acid threatening to corrode the fragile ropes that were holding me -- us -- in place. It panicked me to think I could no longer trust myself to do the right thing by Star. To be... not a saint -- let's face it, you didn't have to be a saint -- just an ordinary tongue-holding, time-biding, mother.

  That day I withheld only by staring at the piercings in her eyebrow and not letting her words in. Bits filtered through: that I needed to back off and let her be who she was, stop fretting and nagging, give her space. That, again, we were too much for each other because we had no other family.

  I let her speak on and on and let her finish and, when she was done, I said, "Okay, honey. Fair enough. I'll think about what you've said."

  But that was wrong too.

  "Is that it? Is that all you're going to say?"

  The items on my counter-list, all the things I felt she did wrong, banked up behind my teeth, banging to get out. But where would they take us? Only down a pathway we'd already worn away: me trying to help her see how she created her own misery, she resisting all the way, hearing advice as nagging. She was right, something needed to change.

  That's when I, not knowing what I was doing in choosing this less-travelled road, not knowing all the difference it would make, the terrible places it would take us, said instead: "Star, if I tell you something will you promise not to be mad?"

  "Go on."

  "No, you have to promise."

  "I promise."

  "Really. Will you promise to look on the positive aspects, like Dr Aintree said?"

  I'd been thinking a lot about Ireland. A version of my thesis -- Between The Words: Yeats's Love Poetry To Iseult Gonne -- had been accepted by a small publisher in Dublin, for inclusion in a book of essays about overlooked women in Irish literary history.